July 11, 2014 @ 14:56 EDT

More on the Kodak 6850

The venerable Kodak 6800 and 6850 printers are true workhorses; it's not
uncommon to see them flogged on eBay with upwards of 200,000 prints on
them -- not because they are worn out, but because they tend to outlast
the systems they're plugged into.

I originally added support for these models to Gutenprint the better
part of two years ago, and through some helpful volunteers, I was able
to reverse-engineer enough of the printer communications to write an
open-source CUPS backend to enable them to print under Linux.

That seemed to be good enough, and I generally forgot about these
models.. until a few months ago, when the folks over at
LiveLink arranged to have an Kodak
6850 sent my way. (These guys are awesome, BTW!)

Having full access to one of these things made it far easier to poke and
prod and generally reverse-engineer the printer communications.
Consequently, I've mostly decoded the printer media status (now with
print counts!) and media query messages, and greatly improved error
detection and recovery.

It's probably safe to say it now works better under Linux than it ever
did with the Official Windows/OSX drivers, though without access to a
5x7 conversion kit and media I'm sure there's something I've missed.

In other news, I'm still hunting down some bugs involving the Sony
UP-DR200, Canon CP900, and Mitsubishi CP-D70/CP-K60 models, but with
only indirect access progress is slow.

It would be so much easier if the manufacturers of these things could
toss some documentation my way. It could only help them sell more
printers and media, after all..